I’m coming from Emacs and I’m trying to fill in the basics I’m accustomed to. One feature which I can’t find in Atom is what in the Emacs world is called bookmarks. (The Atom bookmarks package does something related but it’s more limited.) With bookmarks you can bookmark a file. Emacs remembers the file as well as your location in the file the last time you opened it, but the important thing is that you can open a file with just a few keystrokes, using an assigned nickname. For instance, a file
/Users/JohnDoe/Papers/CS/Proof_of_P_v_NP.tex
could be assigned the nickname pvnp. Then to load it, you don’t need to navigate to it in the file system. You just type C-xrb and you are prompted for the nickname. You type pvnp (and there’s completion) and it loads the file.

I use this useful feature constantly on emacs The absence of it in Atom is really a show stopper for me. I can’t believe it doesn’t already exist, but I don’t know what package it would be in.

I don’t think a screen capture is going to be more informative than my verbal description.

Perhaps I can write the functionality myself. I’ve done a fair bit of programming in the past, but never coffeescript. How would you describe the learning curve to write something for Atom starting from scratch?

How would you describe the learning curve to write something for Atom starting from scratch?

I would be the wrong person to answer you this, though I have coded some pieces placed in init.coffee. Not having examples to work from made it tough for me. I do not even know Javascript and family.

The biggest challenge IMO for your project is the UI. It needs to interact with the user to (1) link a file with a lookup name and (2) select the lookup name. Saving a lookup table and actually opening files is a minor in comparison.